The Counselor, Cormac McCarthy’s much-anticipated screen-writing
debut paints an elusive, eccentric, exquisitely rendered picture of poetic
pain. Filled with bizarre, bone-grinding violence, twisted characters,
confusion and moral compromise, Ridley Scott’s movie becomes a sodden, sordid
cautionary tale of good and—mostly—evil. If you were looking forward to the
crime thriller—more Tony
than Ridley—the film’s trailer
seems bent on promoting, The Counselor
is not it.
Michael Fassbender heads a burning hot all-star cast, all outshined,
hover, by the pulpy, lyrical, hardboiled and hell-bound script, a foray into
the mesmerizing and merciless milieu of corrosive drug trade on the
American-Mexican border—a barrier as moral as it is geographical for much of
American fiction. McCarthy and Scott enter a closed, dangerous, elite world,
devoid of any ordinary people to act as gateways or guides for the audience or
to remind us of a reality beyond the brutal one of the cartel.
Generally a by-the-book kind of lawyer, Fassbender’s character—just
this once—wants to get in on a very big upcoming drug deal with his client
Reiner (played with scenery-chewing aplomb and abandon by Javier
Bardem), who enjoys a lurid, lavish lifestyle with Malkina (Cameron Diaz),
a walking, talking case of foreshadowing and metaphor. “Counselor, I always
thought a law degree was a license to steal,” Reiner tells his lawyer. “And
you, for one, haven’t really capitalized on it.” It’s never too late to start.
The Counselor luxuriates in
presenting these bright, colorful, wealthy individuals, who inhabit a dazzling,
dizzying delirium of high-class cars, clothes, and houses which is both
sumptuous and sickening. “You think you can live in this world and not be a
part of it?” Brad Pitt's bemused
middleman asks. Think again.
These people live to hunt and hunt to kill. Diaz’s fierce and forceful femme
fatale, sporting a severe asymmetrical haircut, silver fingernails, a gold
tooth and a ring with a rock the size of an apple, is possibly the second best
thing about The Counselor (after
the script), deadlier and much less
tame than her pet cheetahs, whose spots she has tattooed on her own body.
The thing about earthly demise and moral damnation—at least from what
the movies teach us— is that you always have a choice. After repeated, original
and ornate, warnings, Fassbender’s lawyer makes the wrong one, a deal whose Faustian
contract will be signed and honored in blood. Early on, Reiner asks the Counselor
if he knows what a bolito is and then describes it as a self-powered, virtually
unstoppable-once-activated device extremely effective at separating heads from
bodies within seconds—you know you’re going to see this thing, the mother of
all Chekhov guns,
and, no, it’s not the only decapitation-by-wire in the movie.
The forces of unforgiving retribution gather and the blood tides rise,
and, for anyone acquainted with Pulitzer Prize winner McCarthy’s work, the
question is not if darkness will overtake everything and everyone, but when.
The violence—sentiment-free, systematic, almost surgical—comes as no surprise.
What’s surprising is how long it takes to arrive, each second of delay
amplifying the dread.
And if you thought McCarthy’s world couldn’t get any darker, consider
the fact that Fassbender’s character is imperiled specifically because he did a
good deed, not because of his involvement with Reiner. Early in the movie, he bails
a young man out of prison as a favor to his mother (Rosie Perez),
without knowing of his connections to the drug business. The Counselor will
soon realize his mistake, but, as he is reminded at a particularly desperate
intersection of circumstances, “The world in which you seek to undo your
mistakes is not the world in which they were made.”
The plot is at once essential and incidental. The narrative, a story of
a man boarding a downward train—or a trolley ride in which the last stop is the
cemetery, as Walter
Neff puts it in Double Indemnity—is, perhaps, overly
familiar, but it is repeated again and again specifically because it is speaks
to something enduring in our character, a truth that never burns out.
McCarthy dips his pen deeply into the shadow-stricken world of noir, in
which nothing is certain and right and wrong shift before your eyes, and any
man will damn himself if the price is right. The Counselor wants to enter a
dirty, demented world and walk away clean and sane. In the tradition of the
best noir heroes, he will become increasingly soiled and sweaty as the spider
web ensnaring him gradually tightens its stifling grip.
In its droning, dense dialogues and heightened, heavily stylized monologues,
filled with jokes, archaic words, odd cadences and terrifying anecdotes, The Counselor proves itself supremely,
self-consciously mindful of its own literary and pop cultural regard and
references. Elevated, eloquent words are placed incongruously in the mouths of
some deeply disreputable figures, notably Pitt’s calculated, in-control—or so
he’d like to think—philosophic cowboy. The film abounds in poetically phrased
but realistically dubious lines like “truth has no temperature,”
uttered by Malkina when accused of coldness in her words.
Sexy and sleek, Scott’s seductive spin in the dark side of American
storytelling casts its dark, delicious spell. In his review,
Roger Ebert called the Coen brothers’ Oscar-winning No Country for Old Men, based on McCarthy’s novel, a “masterful
evocation of time, place, character, moral choices, immoral certainties, human
nature and fate.” That film was, indeed, perfect. I didn’t like it. At the
time, I thought it was exaggeratedly, unnecessarily dark and stylized; I have
come to realize it wasn’t dark and stylized enough. The Counselor doesn’t evoke time, place, character, moral choices,
immoral certainties, human nature and fate as much as create its own wicked,
warped version of them as seen through the lens of other, countless works of
film and fiction. It goes that extra length into absurdity and nihilism that No Country for Old Men simply hinted at.
In comparison, it is a deeply imperfect movie. I loved it.
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